Good News Network has reported on remarkable rediscoveries before — animals last seen in the 20th century, presumed gone, then photographed again in some overlooked forest or highland. But the story emerging from the island of New Guinea stretches that pattern to an entirely different dimension.
Two species of arboreal marsupials — known to science only from fossilised bones dating back more than 6,000 years — have been confirmed to still exist. They were never seen in the 20th century. They have no living witnesses. They dropped out of the fossil record six millennia ago and were assumed gone forever.
They weren't.
**The Two Species**
The pygmy long-fingered possum (*Dactylonax kambuayai*) and the ring-tailed glider (*Tous ayamaruensis*) are the newest confirmed members of a very exclusive category in natural history. Scientists call them **Lazarus taxa**: lineages that vanish from the fossil record for extended periods, then reappear, alive, in the living world.
The discoverers describe finding them using exactly that language. 'A relatively small number of animal species hold the distinction of having been described initially from fossil remains, then subsequently discovered as a living animal,' the authors of the discovery paper write. 'In paleontology, lineages that drop out of the fossil record and then re-emerge after long periods are termed Lazarus taxa.'
These two species are now among them.
**How They Were Found**
The story of the rediscovery is as remarkable as the rediscovery itself, woven together from three separate threads: archaeological bones, museum misidentifications, and a wildlife photographer's lucky shot.
In the late 20th century, archaeological excavations on Stone Age sites in West Papua — the Indonesian-controlled portion of the island of New Guinea, known as the Vogelkop or Bird's Head Peninsula — found skull and teeth evidence of an animal not previously known from the fossil record. In 2007, one researcher argued, based on anatomical similarities to living marsupials, that the animal probably still existed somewhere on New Guinea's vast, underexplored terrain.
New Guinea is one of the world's least biologically documented large landmasses. Its forests are dense, its interior mountainous, its wildlife poorly surveyed. The idea that unknown or long-lost species might still inhabit its remoter corners is not implausible — it's routine.
A photographer named Carlos Bocos, visiting the Vogelkop on a trip organised by mammalwatching.org, recently photographed an unusual long-fingered possum in a tree. Long-fingered possums (*Dactylonax* species) are already known from New Guinea — they have freakishly elongated third digits that they use to probe for wood-boring insects, somewhat like the aye-aye of Madagascar. Bocos's photograph was intriguing but not definitive; two other *Dactylonax* species are known from the region.
The key came from a museum in Jayapura. Two specimens of what appeared to be a closely related species had been stored at the University of New Guinea for teaching purposes, wrongly identified. When lead author Tim Flannery — now 70 years old, one of Australia's most celebrated zoologists and naturalists — examined them, the misidentification became clear. The specimens were not the known related species. They were *Dactylonax kambuayai*: the pygmy long-fingered possum, living.
A similar process confirmed the ring-tailed glider. A photograph of a subadult, taken in 2015 by Arman Muharmansyah, matched the skeletal descriptions from the archaeological record.
**'A Crowning Glory'**
For Tim Flannery, the discovery is deeply personal as well as scientifically extraordinary. 'We've been able to finalise two pieces of work that are incredibly important from a biological and a conservation perspective, documenting the existence of rare marsupials in an area under threat,' he told the Guardian. 'It's sort of a crowning glory in my career as a biologist.'
The Vogelkop Peninsula faces significant environmental pressure — deforestation, mining development, agricultural expansion. Knowing that two marsupial species previously unknown to living science exist there adds urgency and specificity to conservation priorities in the region.
**What 'Lazarus Taxa' Tell Us**
The philosophical implications of this discovery are worth sitting with for a moment.
When a species drops out of the fossil record, absence of evidence is not, as this case strikingly demonstrates, evidence of absence. Six thousand years is not geological time — it is the span of recorded human civilisation. These animals have been here, somewhere in New Guinea's forests, throughout all of recorded human history. We simply hadn't looked carefully enough, or in the right places.
New Guinea is large. It is complex. It is underexplored. And if two marsupial species can survive there, invisible to science, for six millennia — the question of what else might be out there is not merely academic.
'Once in a lifetime' is what Tim Flannery called it. But New Guinea has, perhaps, been waiting to deliver this news for a while. 🐾
*Sources: Flannery et al. (2026) — Records of the Australian Museum · The Guardian · Good News Network · mammalwatching.org*
